Category: Book

When Books and Films Complete Each Other

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Fresh from my recent post on movies that are better than books, I now consider books and movies with symbiotic or synergistic energy – better together.

I first stumbled onto this realisation with The World According to Garp. Hearing that the film was about to be released, I bought the book; it was decent. I saw the movie when it came out; it was decent.

  • The book (John Irving, 1978) is sprawling, grotesque, and digressive, with moments of brilliance scattered through longueurs.
  • The film (1982), with Robin Williams and Glenn Close, trims away nuance for two hours of cinematic shorthand.
  • Alone, each feels middling. Together, they fill the gaps. The novel provides texture and detail; the film provides embodiment and immediacy. It’s like puzzle pieces snapping together.

We tend to frame it as a duel: book versus movie, page versus screen. One must be superior, the other a pale imitation. But occasionally, the two work in tandem, not rivals, but co-conspirators. Taken alone, each may be “just okay.” Together, they form a whole greater than their parts. Notice that the IMDB scores are lower for movies that are better than books, due to the synergistic effects.

Disclaimer: I didn’t like these uniformly, but my thesis still holds. Moreover, film is not typically my preferred medium.

Here are a few other book–film pairings that work this way:

The Remains of the Day (Book: 1989; Film: 1993)

Ishiguro’s novel is all repressed interiority; Hopkins and Thompson turn repression into visible ache. Read the words, then watch the faces.

IMDB Rating: 7.8/10

Atonement (Book: 2001; Film: 2007)

McEwan’s metafictional games on the page feel cerebral. Wright’s film, with its Dunkirk tracking shot and that infamous green dress, floods the senses. Together they fuse thought and feeling.

IMDB Rating: 7.8/10

Brokeback Mountain (Short story: 1997; Film: 2005)

Proulx’s prose is spare, devastating in its restraint. Ang Lee’s film opens the silences into landscape and longing. Neither feels whole without the other.

IMDB Rating: 7.7/10

The English Patient (Book: 1992; Film: 1996)

Ondaatje’s novel is fragmentary and poetic, but elusive. Minghella’s film distils it into romantic tragedy. One gives the music, the other the melody.

IMDB Rating: 7.4/10

Cloud Atlas (Book: 2004; Film: 2012)

Mitchell’s Russian-doll narratives dazzle but drag; the Wachowskis’ intercutting dazzles but confuses. Together they hint at the ambition neither medium alone quite nails.

I publicly confess that I didn’t really like either version of Cloud Atlas. A mate suggested I read the book ahead of the film. It was convoluted and mid. Ditto for the film, but for different reasons. I felt that the concept was nice; it simply didn’t translate. YMMV.

IMDB Rating: 7.4/10

Lord of the Flies (Book: 1954; Film: 1963)

Golding’s allegory sometimes feels over-determined. Brook’s film, shot with actual boys descending into ferality, restores the anthropology behind the allegory.

IMDB Rating: 6.9/10

Why Symbiosis Matters

When book and film complete one another, it challenges the false binary of better or worse. Sometimes, the text supplies what the film cannot: detail, psychology, interior voice. Sometimes the film supplies what the text cannot: embodiment, atmosphere, a world you can see.

Instead of competition, the relationship becomes conversation.

So perhaps the real question isn’t “Which is better?” but “Which needs the other to feel complete?”

What pairings have you found where book and film together elevate each other beyond what either could manage alone?

When the Movie Outshines the Book

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3–4 minutes

I recently watched two movies. The book The Children of Men was published by P.D. James in 1992, and the movie was adapted by Alfonso Cuarón in 2006; Filth was written by Irvine Welsh in 1998 and adapted for film by Jon S. Baird in 2013.

Upon watching Children of Men, I came away feeling that the movie was better than the book – at least it resonated more to my liking. A person with other sensibilities may prefer the other. Taste is never universal. I understand that some people can actually eat seafood.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

The book Filth was more typical in that it was better than the movie, although the movie was interesting in its own right; it still paled in comparison. I also found Trainspotting – another Irvine Welsh story – to be a good movie, but it still doesn’t quite live up to the book.

So where am I going with this?

I decided to consider what movies surpassed their source material. I chatted it up with several colleagues and came up with a short list of titles I suspect many have already encountered at least one or the other. I’ll mention where I disagree with the consensus position.

Here’s my rogue’s gallery of films that managed the rare trick of outshining their ink-and-paper parents. Note that this doesn’t represent the order of importance. It is sorted by IMDB film rating as of today.

Shawshank Redemption (Book: 1982; Film: 1994)

Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is solid, but Darabont turns it into a near-religious fable of hope, anchored by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman.

IMDB Rating: 9.3/10

The Godfather (Book: 1969; Film: 1972)

Mario Puzo’s novel is pulpy, uneven, and bogged down with subplots; e.g., a chapter on vaginal surgery, no joke. Francis Ford Coppola elevates it into a Shakespearean tragedy.

IMDB Rating: 9.2/10

Fight Club (Book: 1996; Film: 1999)

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is culty fun, but Fincher sharpens it into a pop-culture grenade – stylistically explosive and endlessly quoted.

IMDB Rating: 8.8/10

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Book: 1962; Film: 1975)

Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is beloved but limited by its narrator’s hallucinations. Milos Forman widens the lens, gives Nicholson free rein, and makes Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched iconic.

IMDB Rating: 8.7/10

Silence of the Lambs (Book: 1988; Film: 1991)

Thomas Harris’s prose is serviceable, but hardly the stuff to haunt your dreams; Demme’s film, on the other hand, gnaws at your brainstem.

IMDB Rating: 8.6/10

Psycho (Book: 1959; Film: 1960)

Robert Bloch’s Psycho is a tidy pulp thriller. Hitchcock elevates it to a cultural earthquake: the shower scene, mother’s voice, the birth of the modern slasher film.

IMDB Rating: 8.5/10

The Shining (Book: 1977; Film: 1980)

Stephen King hated Kubrick’s icy interpretation, but cinephiles generally rank the film higher for its visual dread and Nicholson’s unhinged performance.

IMDB Rating: 8.4/10

Apocalypse Now (Book: 1899; Film: 1979)

Inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s novella is foundational but slight. Coppola transposes it to Vietnam and creates an operatic nightmare of war.

Apocalypse Now is the consensus masterpiece, and I’ll grant Coppola his fever-dream credentials. But here’s where I part ways with the choir: strip away the meta-theme and you’re left with a bloated war movie that mistakes endurance for profundity.

IMDB Rating: 8.4/10

There Will Be Blood (Book: 1927; Film: 2007)

Upton Sinclair’s socialist novel Oil! is didactic and sprawling. Paul Thomas Anderson cherry-picks a few ideas and creates a volcanic character study of greed and obsession.

IMDB Rating: 8.2/10

Blade Runner (Book: 1968; Film: 1982)

Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is clever but meandering; Ridley Scott builds a visual and philosophical cathedral around identity, memory, and humanity.

IMDB Rating: 8.1/10

Jaws (Book: 1974; Film: 1975)

Peter Benchley’s novel is a soap opera with adultery and mobsters. Spielberg ditches the melodrama and delivers pure terror and awe.

IMDB Rating: 8.1/10

Stand by Me (Book: 1982; Film: 1986)

Stephen King’s second entry, novella The Body, is a touching coming-of-age tale, but Reiner’s adaptation injects nostalgia, pathos, and one of the best ensemble casts of the ’80s.

IMDB Rating: 8.1/10

Honourable Mentions

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From Less Than Zero to Trainspotting: The Cinematic Pasteurisation of Addiction

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Film has an extraordinary talent for turning jagged, difficult novels into cultural smoothies. Hand Hollywood a text about drugs, despair, and the grotesque collapse of youth, and it will hand you back something fit for a date night. Less Than Zero was gutted. Trainspotting was diluted. Both survived, after a fashion, but only one crawled back out with its bones still rattling.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Ellis’s Less Than Zero was a flatline pulse of Californian ennui, a catalogue of hollow gestures in which the children of wealth consume themselves into oblivion. The backdrop was Reaganism in full bloom—an America drunk on consumerism, cocaine, and the fantasy of eternal prosperity. The kids in Ellis’s Los Angeles aren’t rebelling; they’re marinating in the very ideology that produced them. The film, by contrast, became a tepid morality play, complete with Robert Downey Jr.’s photogenic martyrdom. The void was swapped for a sermon: drugs are bad, lessons have been learned, and the Reaganite dream remains intact.

Welsh’s Trainspotting was messier, darker, harder to pasteurise. His junkies live in Thatcher’s Britain, where industry has collapsed, communities have rotted, and heroin fills the crater where meaningful work and social support once stood. Addiction is not just chemical but political: it is Thatcher’s neoliberalism rendered in track marks. Boyle’s film kept the faeces, the dead baby, the violence—but also imposed coherence, Renton as protagonist, a redemption arc, and that chirpy “Choose Life” coda. Welsh’s episodic chaos was welded into a three-act rave, all set to Underworld and Iggy Pop. Diluted, yes, but in a way that worked: a cocktail still intoxicating, even if the glass had been sanitised.

And yet, here’s the perennial fraud: drug films always get high wrong. No matter how grim the setting, the “junkie experience” is rendered as theatre, actors impersonating a template someone else once performed badly. The reality of heroin use is crushingly dull: twenty minutes of near-unconsciousness, slack faces, dead time. But you can’t sell tickets to drool and silence. So we get Baudrillard’s simulacrum: a copy of a copy of an inaccurate performance, dressed up as reality. McGregor’s manic sprint to “Born Slippy.” Downey’s trembling collapse. Junkies who look good on screen, because audiences demand their squalor to be cinematic.

And here’s where readers outpace viewers. Readers don’t need their despair blended smooth. They can sit with a text for days, grappling with jagged syntax, bleak repetitions, and moral vacuums. Viewers get two hours, max, and the thing must be purréd into something digestible. Of course, not all books are intellectual, and not all films are pap. But the balance is clear: readers wrestle, viewers swallow. One is jagged nourishment, the other pasteurised baby food.

So Less Than Zero becomes a sermon that spares Reagan’s dream, Trainspotting becomes a rave-poster that softens Thatcher’s wreckage, and audiences leave the cinema convinced they’ve glimpsed the underbelly. What they’ve really consumed is a sanitised simulation, safe for bourgeois digestion. The true addict, the tedious, unconscious ruin of the body, is nowhere to be found, because no audience wants that reality. They want the thrill of transgression without the boredom of truth.

And that, finally, is the trick: cinema gives you Reagan’s children and Thatcher’s lost boys, but only after they’ve been scrubbed clean and made photogenic. Literature showed us the rot; film sells us the simulacrum. Choose Life, indeed.

What You Should Ask a Beta Reader (and What You Shouldn’t)

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Chef reading a cookbook that reads Beta Recipes

Congratulations, you’ve finished a manuscript. You’ve pushed the boulder uphill, typed “The End,” and maybe even convinced yourself you’re done. Spoiler: you’re not. This is where beta readers come in — those kind souls who’ll slog through your draft and tell you whether it sings, stumbles, or just sits there like porridge. The trouble is, most writers don’t actually know what to ask them, and so they end up with feedback about as useful as a horoscope.

The first and most uncomfortable question is about intent. What are my goals in writing this, and did you see them? Most writers never ask, because it forces them to say what they meant in the first place. Are you interrogating free will? Trying to write a page-turner? Smuggling philosophy under the hood of a dystopian thriller? If your beta doesn’t see it, either you buried it too deep or you didn’t put it in at all. Of course, not every writer works with some grand meta in mind, but if you do, this is the question that makes or breaks the project.

If your story feels like homework, you’ve already lost.

Enjoyment comes next, even if it bruises the ego. Did they actually like reading it? If your story feels like homework, you’ve already lost. It’s better to know this from a sympathetic reader now than from Goodreads later. A related angle is pacing: where did the story drag? Readers know exactly where they reached for their phone, even if they’re too polite to say so without prompting. Ask them to point to the spots where the air went out of the room.

Did the conclusion feel like it belonged to the story’s own logic?

Characters are another litmus test. Which ones did they care about, and which ones left them cold? Writers are often too close to notice when a protagonist reads like cardboard, or when a side character steals the oxygen. Beta readers are your lab rats here, revealing who’s magnetic and who’s forgettable. The same goes for endings. Don’t ask if it was happy – ask if it was satisfying. Did the conclusion feel like it belonged to the story’s own logic? If the reader feels cheated, the manuscript isn’t finished.

World-building deserves its own interrogation, especially in speculative fiction. Readers will happily forgive dragons, AI dictators, or interstellar chalk drawings, but not inconsistency. If the rules of your world shift without reason, they’ll notice. In fact, coherence is more important than cleverness. The reader doesn’t need to understand every mechanism, but they do need to trust that you do.

Was there an image, a phrase, a scene that stayed with them once the book was closed?

Finally, ask what lingered afterwards. Was there an image, a phrase, a scene that stayed with them once the book was closed? That’s your gold. Double down on it. If nothing sticks, you’ve got polishing to do.

One last but often overlooked question is about the reader themselves: am I asking the right person? An excellent sci-fi enthusiast might not be your best pick for YA urban fiction. A romance aficionado won’t necessarily grasp the rhythms of a philosophy-laden dystopia. Fit matters. You wouldn’t ask a vegan to taste-test your steakhouse menu, so don’t ask the wrong reader to bless your book.

Am I asking the right person?

And here’s the tightrope for the beta reader: they are not there to tell you the book they would have written. Their job is to respond to the book you actually put on the page. It’s your manuscript, not a co-authorship audition. If their feedback starts with “what I would have done,” that’s not critique – that’s a rewrite.

The meta point is simple. Beta readers are not editors. They aren’t there to fix your commas or restructure your second act. Their value is in telling you what it feels like to read your book – hot, cold, flat, or electric. And if you’ve got a grand philosophical undercurrent humming beneath the surface, they’re the only ones who can tell you whether it came across.

Beta readers are not editors.

So don’t hand your beta readers a scalpel and ask them to perform surgery. Hand them your story and ask: did you taste what I meant to cook?

Trainspotting Takes Over

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Generative AI, review, Ridley Park, Setting, Status Update, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’ve just finished Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex – all 800 pages of it – and have now started Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. Both are classics in their own way. I’ll review Second Sex properly on my Philosophics Blog, but here I want to think about Trainspotting in relation to my current manuscript, Needle’s Edge.

Interestingly, Trainspotting was a ChatGPT recommendation. I fed in my draft of Needle’s Edge and this was one of the books it said my work resembled. Two chapters in, I see the connexion. First, the subject matter – drugs and addiction. Second, the rawness of the experience.

There are differences, of course. Trainspotting is rooted in Leith, Scotland; Needle’s Edge belongs to the East Coast of the United States – Delaware and Philadelphia. Welsh draws heavily on dialect and vernacular, with a narrative voice that’s linguistically dense and aurally charged. In Needle’s Edge, the style is pared down. Sentence fragments, middle dots instead of full stops, and an intentional “lower” register mirror the protagonist’s fractured perception and limited resources.

That gap in register creates a different authorial challenge. With every edit pass, I find myself policing intrusions of my vocabulary into her voice. Welsh, by contrast, can deploy a broader lexicon and trust the dialectal texture to keep it authentic. Listening to Trainspotting, I’m struck by how words and turns of phrase leap out – sometimes apt for Needle’s Edge, but often just a shade too polished for Stacey’s world.

Both texts orbit around environments that resist glamour. Welsh’s squat flats and pubs are grimy and feral; Needle’s Edge’s motel rooms and sidewalks are littered with fast-food wrappers, orange caps, and fading unicorn posters. Addiction erodes bodies in both stories, but the textures differ – Scotland’s industrial gray versus the East Coast’s cheap motels and suburban detritus.

As for the film version of Trainspotting, I saw it long ago and remember almost nothing. The novel isn’t refreshing my memory either; it feels like a separate creature altogether. Which is fitting: both Trainspotting and Needle’s Edge are less about plot than about capturing a lived texture, a rhythm of voices and environments that mainstream narratives usually discard.

When a Meme Lies but the Story Survives

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Story ideas come from everywhere. Sometimes from books, sometimes from overheard conversations, sometimes from the dubious cesspool of internet memes. The meme I saw claimed that male flatworms duel with their penises to determine which one gets saddled with pregnancy. Naturally, I thought: That’s a story seed if ever I’ve seen one. Biomimicry is also a viable source.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Of course, the meme was wrong. Flatworms aren’t male, or female. They’re simultaneous hermaphrodites – every worm is kitted out with sperm factories and egg sacs, with duelling penises to boot. When two meet, they fence. Whoever lands the stab injects sperm through the other’s skin (hypodermic insemination, to use the clinical term). The “winner” struts away as father, the “loser” absorbs the sperm, becomes mother, and carries the eggs. Sometimes both stab each other, and both walk away victorious fathers and reluctant mothers. Equality at last.

Becoming a Woman with Penetration Politics
Article: Story Genesis

When a Meme Lies but the Story Survives

This is not genre fantasy, it’s zoology. No X or Y chromosomes, no fixed roles, just biology as a knife fight.

Writers, take note: this is why you don’t trust memes as science, but you do trust them as inspiration. The error – “male flatworms” – was pedestrian. The truth – all flatworms are both sexes all the time – is far more subversive. It blows up the binary and replaces it with a contest. Parenthood isn’t destiny, it’s a duel.

If I were to anthropomorphise this, I’d have the makings of a gladiator society: wounds as wombs, motherhood as punishment, fatherhood as prize. Not homoerotic vampire tropes, not vagina dentata horror – something stranger, sharper, harder to tame. A kind of Spartacus with gonads.

The point isn’t whether I’ll write it (probably not; worms don’t sell). The point is that even bad science can spark good fiction, provided you bother to check the details before running to press. Let the meme start the fire, let the facts shape the flame.

See Also (for the bookish wormhole explorer):

David Brin, Glory Season: speculative reproductive politics, society structured by cloning and sexual cycles.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness: androgynous Gethenians shifting between fatherhood and motherhood.

Kij Johnson, Mantis Wives (short story): erotic horror inspired by mantis cannibalism, equal parts Kama Sutra and war crime.

Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve: grotesque gender-bending satire, bodies rewritten as battlegrounds.

James Tiptree Jr., The Screwfly Solution (short story): apocalyptic biology, where desire mutates into violence.

Books Read in 2025 (So Far)

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Some bloke on social media posted to celebrate hitting his 10-book milestone for the year. It made me reflect on my own. I don’t keep a running tally, but I do use Goodreads, so I reviewed my list. I share it here. Evidently, I’ve read 22 so far. In all honesty, I cheated, because I won’t finish The Second Sex until later this evening or tomorrow morning. Sue me.

The Second Sex —Simone de Beauvoir
In its day, I may be given this 4 stars. NONFICTION. Today, perhaps 3, but it’s a seminal work, so I’ll give it 3½.

Notes from Underground —Fyodor Dostoevsky
5 stars. FICTION. Perhaps 4½, rounded up. This came with Apropos of the Wet Snow, where it all falls apart (in a satisfying way).

The Death of Ivan Ilych —Leo Tolstoy
4 stars. FICTION. Led me to Notes from Underground.

The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface —Donald Maass
4 stars. NONFICTION. Not quite up my street, but I found it useful.

High-Rise —J.G. Ballard
3 stars. FICTION. This was another ChatGPT suggestion*. Meh.

Crash —J.G. Ballard
3 stars. FICTION. This was a ChatGPT suggestion*. Generous 3. Probably a 2½ if I’m being honest.

Acceptance —Jeff VanderMeer
3 stars. FICTION. This was not as good as Annihilation, but it got the bad taste of Authority out of my mouth. It closed the loop in the Southern Reach universe.

Authority —Jeff VanderMeer
1 star. FICTION. This was horrible. I wanted to read more about the Southern Reach universe. This prequel should have been an email.

Annihilation —Jeff VanderMeer
4 stars. NONFICTION. This was a ChatGPT suggestion*. I liked it. Much better than the movie with Natalie Portman.

Never Let Me Go —Kazuo Ishiguro
4 stars. NONFICTION. This was a ChatGPT suggestion*. It took a few chapters to see where this was going, but it was worth the wait.

Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think —George Lakoff
4 stars. NONFICTION. This is simultaneously dated and relevant, if a bit reductionist. Still worth a read.

The Society of the Spectacle —Guy Debord
2 stars. NONFICTION. Probably only 1½. Very little worthwhile content.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory —David Graeber
4 stars. NONFICTION. A generous 4, but the idea has relevance.

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism —Yanis Varoufakis
4 stars. NONFICTION. A deserved 4.

Snow Crash —Neal Stephenson
4 stars. FICTION. This was a ChatGPT suggestion*. Not dated, per se, but naïve, written in the early 1990s.

Neuromancer —William Gibson
2 stars. FICTION. This was a ChatGPT suggestion*. Evidently started the Cyberpunk genre. Not a Gibson fan.

A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains —Max Solomon Bennett
4 stars. FICTION. I liked this when I read it. Honestly, I don’t remember much about it.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? —Mark Fisher
4 stars. NONFICTION. As relevant as when it was published in 2009.

Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground —Kurt Gray
3 stars. NONFICTION. Reductionist and derivative. Follows on the coattails of Jonathan Haight. Not a fan… of either.

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI —Yuval Noah Harari
3 stars. NONFICTION. Reductionist. In a different league than Sapiens. Some mates recommended I read this. ChatGPT has given me better choices.

On Liberty —John Stuart Mill
4 stars. NONFICTION. Pleasantly surprised.

Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives —George Lakoff.
3 stars. NONFICTION. This is Moral Politics stripped down for mass consumption. Read the full version.

Abandonned

The Left Hand of Darkness —Ursula K. Le Guin
3 stars. FICTION. This was a ChatGPT suggestion*. Read 8 or 9 chapters. Didn’t realise it was #7 in a series. Was OK. Not a Sci-Fi fan. Love her short stories.

Measure What Matters —John Doerr
2 stars. NONFICTION. Business self-help pablum. Hard pass.

English after RP —Geoff Lindsey
3 stars. NONFICTION. I liked this book and the author, but I can’t justify completing a linguistics reference book at this time. Maybe later.

* ChatGPT recommendations stem from my feeding draft manuscripts and prompting who it reads like.

Video: Discussing Needle’s Edge, Part 1

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Some novels are born in a lightning bolt. Needle’s Edge was forged in sediment: years of observations, contradictions, and lived experience settling into something that could no longer be ignored.

Video: Author Ridley Park Discusses Needle’s Edge

The video is intentionally, if not mercifully, short for all parties considered; it comes in under five minutes.

From the description:

Needle’s Edge is Ridley Park’s latest novel-in-progress, a raw, unvarnished work of literary realism with grit under its nails and philosophy in its bloodstream.

In this first episode of a new series on my writing process, I unpack the origins of Needle’s Edge: from life between the vantage point of an anthropologist and the poetry of Bukowski, to lived experience inside the worlds of sex work, addiction, and the quiet economies of trust and betrayal.

I reflect on the shift from speculative fiction to a tethered, reality-bound narrative, a story that rejects morality tales, subverts tropes, and meets its protagonist, Sarah, in the middle of her life before looping back to her beginnings. Along the way, he weaves in themes from Simone de Beauvoir, explores personae and code-switching, and interrogates the myths of middle-class respectability.

This is not a documentary – twenty years of lived history are compressed into five – but it’s true in its bones. Join me as he begins peeling back the layers of Needle’s Edge and the philosophy that drives it.

She’s Come Undone – Spoilers

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She’s Come Undone is a novel published in 1992, written by Wally Lamb, no relation to Shaun the Sheep.

I haven’t read She’s Come Undone, and it’s unlikely that I ever will. I read a social media post where the author supplanted The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy as his top book. These don’t appear to be the same genre, so don’t ask me how the list was structured. Perhaps books about bears. Does She’s Come Undone have any passages on bears – prequel to The Revenant? We may never find out.

The reason this blog post exists is that I was reading the reviews on Goodreads – 3.91 of 5 stars. So, I read some reviews. This woman offered only one star and swore she’d have given fewer if she could. Odd, how zeros don’t carry the same weight. They act more like NULLs than zeroes. Sad, that.

Evidently, some commenters were furious at her revealing the spoiler. I share her defence here. For those who have yet to watch Citizen Kane, I warn you of the spoiler in her response. Read on at your own risk.

Addendum: Every so often, someone comes along and flags this review as having spoilers. Complaining about spoilers in this review is, not to put too fine a point on it, really stupid. Most of the plot points I mention here are either in the actual cover copy of the book, in the Goodreads summary, or occur somewhere within the first ten pages or so. The rest are so vague (e.g., hooking up with a bad boyfriend — a plot point that probably occurs in some form in, oh, half of the books ever written) that if you consider them “spoilers,” I’m not really sure why you read book reviews at all.

Further addendum: If you’re about to complain about spoilers in this review, please see comment 55 below. If you’re that hysterical about spoilers, maybe stop reading online reviews before you read the book. Also, the book was published 25 years ago and I think the statute of limitations has really run on this one. Rosebud was his sled!!

Sturgeon’s Law, AI, and the Literary Ivory Tower

Posted in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Claude, critique, Generative AI, Ridley Park, Software, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
3–4 minutes

Let’s get this out of the way: Sturgeon’s Law, ‘90% of everything is crap‘, isn’t pessimism, it’s statistics. That includes your favourite novel, the collected works of Joyce, and, yes, AI-generated text. The key point? If AI has the same bell curve as human output, some slice of that curve will still be better than what most people write. If Pareto’s Rule feels better at 80%, I’ll cede that ten points.

90% of everything is crap

— Sturgeon’s Law

And before anyone gets misty-eyed about “human genius,” let’s remember that the average American adult reads at a 7th or 8th grade level, and more than half read at or below a 6th grade level. Nearly 1 in 5 reads below a 3rd grade level. That’s not a moral failing, but it is a market reality. We can wail about AI not producing the next Nabokov, but let’s be honest, Nabokov isn’t exactly topping the Costco bestsellers table.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic

Here’s the bit nobody wants to say out loud

  • AI doesn’t have to dethrone the literary elite. It just has to outperform the mass of competent-but-unremarkable human writers serving an audience who, frankly, doesn’t care about “stylistic nuance” or “metafictional self-reflexivity.”
  • There’s a vast literary middle ground – corporate copywriting, trade journalism, formulaic romance, SEO blogs – where AI will not just compete, but dominate, because the audience is reading for function, not art.
  • The high-literary crowd will remain untouched, partly because their readership fetishises human intentionality, and partly because AI doesn’t yet want to write about the precise smell of sadness in a damp Parisian garret in 1934.

The fearmongering about AI “killing literature” is a bit like saying instant ramen will kill haute cuisine. Yes, more people will eat the ramen, but Alain Ducasse isn’t sweating over his stock reduction.

More than half of American adults read at or below a sixth-grade level.

Sparx

This panic is not new. We’ve been here before:

  • The printing press was supposed to obliterate the artistry of the hand-copied manuscript. Instead, it made books accessible and created new genres entirely. Calligraphy still exists, it’s just no longer the only way to get words on a page.
  • Photography was going to end painting. In reality, it freed painters from the burden of strict representation, allowing impressionism, cubism, and abstract art to flourish.
  • Recorded music didn’t destroy live performance, it expanded its reach. Some audiences still pay obscene amounts to see an actual human sweat on stage.
  • Film didn’t kill theatre; it created a parallel art form.
  • Synthesizers didn’t erase orchestras; they just meant you didn’t have to mortgage your house to hear a string section in your pop song.

AI is simply the next entrant in this long tradition of “threats” that turn out to be expansions. It will colonise the big islands of the creative archipelago – commercial writing, functional prose, genre boilerplate – and leave the small monasteries of high art mostly untouched.

So, no, AI won’t be the next Mozart, Picasso, or Nabokov. But it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be good enough to meet – and occasionally exceed – the expectations of the largest share of the market. And given that most readers are happy if the plot makes sense, the spelling’s passable, and the ending doesn’t require a graduate seminar in semiotics to decipher, I’d say AI’s prospects are rather good.

Here’s why that 10% still matters

The rarefied work of the serious literary writer isn’t competing for market share; it’s preserving and evolving the cultural and linguistic possibilities of human expression. That work thrives not because it’s the only thing available, but precisely because it stands apart from the sea of functional prose, human or machine-made. The AI tide will rise, but the lighthouse will still be human.

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